If We Must Die

Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Eric Robert Taylor

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807147856
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

If We Must Die examines nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions that occurred over the course of the entire slave trade, directly challenging the prevailing thesis that such resistance was infrequent or insignificant. As Eric Robert Taylor shows, though most revolts were crushed quickly, others raged on for hours, days, or weeks, and, occasionally, the Africans captured the vessel and returned themselves to freedom. In recounting these rebellions, Taylor suggests that certain factors like geographic location, the involvement of women and children, and the timing of a shipboard revolt, determined the difference between success and failure. Taylor also explores issues like aid from other ships, punishment of slave rebels, and treatment of sailors captured by the Africans. If We Must Die expands the historical view of slave resistance, revealing a continuum of rebellions that spanned the Atlantic as well as the centuries. These uprisings, Taylor argues, ultimately helped limit and end the traffic in enslaved Africans and also served as crucial predecessors to the many revolts that occurred subsequently on plantations throughout the Americas.

1

Enslavement, Detention, and the Middle Passage

In about April of 1794, a group of young African men were bought by South Carolinian slave trader Joseph Hawkins, who was trading in the rivers north of Sierra Leone. Hawkins had arrived in Africa the year before on a slaving expedition and resided inland for some time. Having finally purchased his slaves, he now faced the task of getting these men to his ship, the Charleston, which was anchored off the coast. When the day came for Hawkins and his slaves to begin their journey, the Africans found themselves restrained with poles tied around their necks for the march to the river. It was clear that the Africans were agitated by their new bondage, and in an attempt to calm them, Hawkins promised that such treatment was intended only to keep them from running away and that he was taking them to a place where they would be free of their bonds and have complete liberty. However, once the slaves arrived at the river to board boats that would take them to the coast and their loose wicker bonds were replaced with iron shackles, they quickly realized that Hawkins’s promise had been a lie. Hawkins’s crew soon managed to board all of the captives onto two small boats despite the Africans’ heightened state of unrest.

As the boats made their way down the river, the Africans became more restless with each passing hour. In an attempt to pacify them, Hawkins ordered that they be given alcohol. For a brief time this tactic worked, and there was no trouble that night when the boats anchored. By daybreak, the Africans’ alcohol-induced contentment was gone and the terror of their situation set in again as the journey downriver continued. By noon, the two boats met up with a larger shallop into which all of the Africans were to be loaded for the final leg of the journey to the waiting Charleston. To most safely and easily accomplish this transfer, all three vessels were positioned beside one another in the center of the river. The Africans, who now appeared calmer to the crew, were unshackled in groups of six and moved into the locked hold of the vessel. Running out of space below, Hawkins allowed the last group of Africans to remain on deck.

As the shallop set sail, it must have seemed to Hawkins and his crew that the worst part of their journey to the coast was behind them. But when two of the Africans on deck suddenly jumped overboard as the vessel sailed through a narrow part of the river, it became clear that the captives would not give up without a fight. Although one of these men probably escaped to shore, the other was quickly recaptured, and the ensuing commotion generated by the cries of the slaves on deck set in motion a concerted effort by all the slaves to stage a full insurrection. Several of the Africans attempted to throw two of the sailors overboard, while five others below had freed themselves and were attempting to unshackle the rest. Several crew members had been asleep when the revolt broke out, but they were quickly roused and seized firearms and bayonets. Hawkins, however, was caught unarmed. When he noticed that an African was attempting to take a gun from one of the sailors, Hawkins tried to intervene but was struck so hard by an oar that it severed his little finger. Undeterred, he joined the fight again, this time enabling the sailor to recover his bayonet and kill his African foe. All the while, the rest of the slaves below were shouting encouragement to their fellow rebels above. Those who could not get out of their shackles did the best they could, reaching through the open hatch and holding the legs of the sailors. But in spite of the collective effort of the insurrectionists, the armed crew managed to prevail over the rebelling Africans. By the time the sailors regained control of the vessel, nine Africans and five sailors had been seriously wounded.¹ As this incident suggests, constant vigilance on the part of slave traders was required from the very start. From the march to the water to the voyage down river to the Atlantic crossing, slave traders like Hawkins quickly learned that the least bit of laxity in security measures could mean death.

In order to investigate the nature of shipboard resistance, it is imperative to understand, at least as far as possible so many generations after the fact, what the traumatic experiences of enslavement and life aboard the ships of the Middle Passage must have been like for the countless Africans who made the long voyage across the ocean. Only with the knowledge of these experiences can we truly comprehend the motivations, methods, and strategies of rebelling slaves. Furthermore, without an appreciation of the true enormity of the forces arrayed against slaves during the Atlantic passage, the remarkable tradition of resistance that these men and women mounted cannot be fully valued. An understanding of the experiences of capture, enslavement, and the Middle Passage are fundamental precursors to the story, enabling the history of shipboard resistance to emerge in all of its complexity, power, and importance.

CAPTURE

The Africans who ultimately boarded the Charleston for their voyage to South Carolina were brought to the coast by small boats that carried them down the river. Slaves were sometimes captured quite some distance inland, and slave traders regularly used this quick and efficient method of transporting Africans to the coast. Others were carried down local rivers in canoes, forced to lie in the bottom of the vessel with their hands bound. In certain regions of West Africa, convoys of dozens of canoes would sometimes arrive at the coast to offer their slaves to the waiting ships. Anywhere from just a few to thirty or more Africans would be in each canoe with their arms tied behind their backs. The strongest Africans would be additionally tied at the knees. As Alexander Falconbridge noted in 1788, “[The Africans’] allowance of food is so scanty, that it is barely sufficient to support nature. They are, besides, much exposed to the violent rains which frequently fall here, being covered only with mats that afford but a slight defence; and as there is usually water at the bottom of the canoes, from their leaking, they are scarcely ever dry.”² When rivers were not accessible or boats were not available, Africans instead made the journey to the coast on foot. Whether sold into slavery as debtors or criminals, captured in raids, or enslaved as prisoners of war, Africans often endured a long trek to the coast chained together in coffles of anywhere from ten or twenty to as many as a thousand or more. In the eighteenth century, coffles ranging from twenty to a hundred slaves were probably typical. A European who accompanied one such slave caravan reported in 1799 that a typical coffle in the Senegal River area would march some twenty miles in seven or eight hours every day.³

Chained by the legs and even fastened together at the necks in some cases, these groups would endure inclement weather, scant provisions, and mounting sickness until they eventually arrived at their coastal destinations.⁴ The networks from which men and women were taken extended hundreds of miles inland in certain areas like West Central Africa, necessitating unbearably long treks for some. As time went on and slaving frontiers were exhausted, Africans were captured from increasingly distant locations extending inward toward the center of the continent. To maintain discipline and discourage resistance on these long journeys, slaves were manacled, whipped, and sometimes laden with heavy weights such as pieces of wood weighing as much as thirty pounds attached to their wrists or ankles to prevent flight. Guards would sometimes even keep the entire group awake for days on end, “seating them each night around a large fire, and kicking any who managed to doze off back to wakefulness.”⁵ When they were allowed to sleep, it was not restfully. As one Portuguese doctor wrote, “The night is passed in a state of half sleep and watchfulness, because even during the hours intended for rest and sleep, they are constantly aroused by their black guards, who, fearing an uprising, scream at them and frighten them.”⁶ The Africans may not have known exactly where they were being taken or what was to happen to them once they got there, but it was clear from the start that anything they could do to avoid their coming fate was worth the effort. The minds of many of these men and women quickly turned to resistance, and they carefully watched for any opportunity they might get to spark a rebellion. Those who guarded the Africans were ever aware of this potentiality, and they did whatever they could to avoid it. As Joseph Hawkins wrote, the African captives “were tied to poles in rows, four feet apart; a loose wicker bandage round the neck of each, connected him to the pole, and the arms being pinioned by a bandage affixed behind above the elbows, they had sufficient room to feed, but not to loose themselves, or commit any violence.”⁷ Of course, such precautions were far from foolproof. In one case in about 1755, for example, a coffle of slaves revolted against the two men who had marched them to the coast, and two slaves regained their freedom.⁸

Just as they were at all stages of the slaving process, however, the odds were against the Africans, and most rebellions were unsuccessful. For others, the chance for rebellion never even presented itself. As much as the slaves wanted to escape, the guards diligently sought to protect their own safety, and this was usually sufficient to stifle most conspiracies before they materialized. For most, the march continued, with each agonizing day bringing them closer and closer to the anchored slave ships awaiting their arrival. Barely sustained by poor supplies of food and water, the latter being scarce toward the end of the dry season, these slaves often suffered from severe malnutrition and dehydration. Suffering from hunger and thirst and forced to bear heavy loads of supplies and to sleep without shelter or sufficient clothing, captives were progressively weakened by their trek. As one Luanda merchant noted, slave traders in the latter half of the eighteenth century expected to lose approximately 40 percent of their slaves to either flight or death before reaching the slave ships.⁹ In the illegal era of the mid-nineteenth century, when the presence of naval patrols made the loading of slaves more difficult, captives were sometimes forced to walk forty miles or more along the coast to meet secretly with a slave ship’s canoes.¹⁰ Not all slaves who boarded ships endured such a long and traumatic ordeal, but very few Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic were captured from the immediate area in which they boarded the slave ships, and therefore most endured some sort of forced journey either by foot or by boat to reach the coast.

THE BARRACOON EXPERIENCE

Once at the coast, enslaved Africans continued to suffer, as they were now imprisoned for an indefinite amount of time, awaiting the arrival of slave ships to carry them off. Depending on European wars, the presence of pirates in the Atlantic, the demand for slaves in the Americas, outbreaks of disease on the African coast, and any number of other factors, slave ships could either be plentiful or incredibly scarce at any given time. When ships were scarce, Africans could spend a considerable amount of time either imprisoned in the dark slave pen of a West African trade castle waiting for a ship from one of the chartered European companies to arrive or confined in a makeshift pen constructed on the beach waiting to be sold to the captain of a private trader. Regardless of which of these fates the Africans faced, the wait was intolerable. Describing the barracoons of the major West Central African slave trading ports of Luanda and Benguela, for example, Joseph Miller writes, “Large numbers of slaves accumulated within these pens, living for days and weeks surrounded by walls too high for a person to scale, squatting helplessly, naked, on the dirt and entirely exposed to the skies except for few adjoining cells where they could be locked at night. They lived in a ‘wormy morass’ … and slept in their own excrement, without even a bonfire for warmth.”¹¹ At Benguela, the slave pens sometimes held 150 to 200 slaves, along with pigs and goats, leaving only about two square meters for each captive. This experience would have been both disgusting and disheartening, and Africans were sometimes forced to suffer these conditions for months on end. Probably having already endured a prolonged journey to the coast, many Africans would not survive this phase of their enslavement. As another observer noted, “[The slaves] are confined in prisons or dungeons, resembling dens, where they lie naked on the sand, crowded together and loaded with irons. In consequence of this cruel mode of confinement, they are frequently covered with cutaneous eruptions. Ten or twelve of them feed together out of a trough, precisely like so many hogs.”¹² This dehumanizing experience certainly took its toll on the Africans and must have been extraordinarily confusing and distressing. Not knowing what lay ahead, hearing strange languages all around them as traders bartered with Europeans, catching glimpses of white faces and giant slave ships unlike anything they had ever seen before, close enough perhaps to hear the cannon salutes of ships as they came into port or to smell the cauldrons of food cooking on nearby vessels, many must have become paralyzed with fear and dread.

To make matters worse, disease periodically ravaged the dirty and crowded slave pens, and Africans became progressively weakened by their extended confinement. Death rates were extremely high—probably at least 10–15 percent in the mid- to late-eighteenth-century trade in Angola, for example. When slaves died, traders would unceremoniously bury them or simply throw their bodies onto the beach to rot or to be picked over by animals. Such practices continued in certain locations until the very end of the eighteenth century.¹³ At the Royal African Company’s Cape Coast Castle, mortality was so high that officials in London complained. In 1718, the Castle’s surgeon recommended constructing raised platforms on which the slaves could sleep, proposed the building of separate quarters for the quarantine of sick slaves, and suggested that tubs be placed in the underground dungeon “for the slaves to ease themselves at night.”¹⁴ His statements imply that none of these practices was currently in use, revealing the true nature of what must have been a horrifying place to be confined. As one observer wrote of the conditions at Anomabu Fort on the Gold Coast, “Surrounded on every Side with high Walls, without a possibility of being refreshed with either Sea Breezes or Land Winds, The Slaves [some 450] not over & above cleanly; The Country of itself naturally hot sultry & unwholesome; what other effect can result from such a situation, but to render the place more disagreeable and unhealthy than any Gaol in Europe?”¹⁵ These conditions prevailed wherever slave trading ports sprang up along the African coast, regardless of the nationality of those buying or selling the slaves. In the Dutch castle at Elmina, captives were spared constant imprisonment, as they were instead put to work during their detention. Dutch officials felt that work was better than confinement for the health, and thus the profitability, of the Africans. However, these concerns were only valid when it was considered safe for the slaves to be out of their cells. When darkness fell, the three to four hundred slaves typically held at the castle would be packed into their communal cell for a long and depressing night.¹⁶

In spite of efforts to control the captives, here again Africans did not passively submit to their situation. As on the march to the coast, both flight and insurrection were ever-present possibilities for the slaves, in spite of the slim chances for success. In some barracoons, guards smartly anticipated revolts and cut openings into the walls through which they could thrust muskets and fire upon slaves who became rebellious.¹⁷ But just as handcuffs, neck weights, and psychological torment failed to keep Africans from rebelling in slave coffles, efforts to keep them in check while imprisoned on the coast were similarly insufficient at times. As early as 1667, for instance, slaves killed all but one of a garrison of thirty-two men at an English fort during an insurrection.¹⁸ In August 1727, another group of slaves in Danish Fort Christiansborg on the Gold Coast ambushed and killed the overseer of the fort and temporarily escaped. When half of them were later recaptured, the ringleader was broken on the wheel and subsequently beheaded.¹⁹ Occasionally, slaves would rebel when taken out of the building for fresh air.²⁰ As one official reported in 1820, “[In spite of] precautions, insurrections, as on board the slave ships, were not uncommon.… On one occasion … armed only with the irons and chains of those who were so confined the slaves audaciously attacked the lock-up keeper, at the moment he made his entre to return them to their dungeons after a few hours of basking in the sun.”²¹ And in the 1830s, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Enslavement, Detention, and the Middle Passage
• 2. Conditions Favorable for Revolt
• 3. Precautions against Revolt
• 4. Revolt
• 5. Unsuccessful Revolts
• 6. Successful Revolts
• 7. Shipboard Revolts in the Americas: a New Wave
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Chronology of Shipboard Slave Revolts, 1509–1865
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index